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LinuxPlanet: .comment: A (P)review of KDE2

"There's never been a time in the history of Linux as exciting
as the next few months promise to be: The 2.4.0 kernel promises to
make more hardware work, and the hardware that already works work
better, under Linux than ever before while introducing a host of
exciting new features. (Among those features is allowing the
features introduced in XFree86-4.00 and repaired somewhat in 4.01
to work, though the XFree86 and DRI projects have some work yet to
do, too--perhaps also available in the next few months.) And KDE2
will be released, which to many of us is the most exciting that has
happened to the desktop since Al Gore wrote the original Linux
kernel many years ago."

"Last week the KDE developers imposed a feature freeze for the
2.0 release, so for the first time we have a solid idea of what the
new KDE will comprise. It will be great (it already is), so the
complaints I raise here and there (or, more likely, here, and here,
and here) are minor whines, which isn't to say that the KDE
developers are not cordially invited to follow my sage advice."

"There's nothing in KDE2 that will leave the user of earlier
versions entirely astonished, but there are some things that will
be a little puzzling, perhaps annoying at first (and not
inconceivably annoying after that). Gone are the KPanel and
Taskbar, replaced by a unified thing called Kicker. It contains a
number of links to applications by default; unlike the old KPanel,
you can drag a file onto it and drop it there. This is of course
useful for application launching, for those apps you don't want to
navigate the KMenu to find. Yes, the KMenu is still there, though
the familiar alphabetical listing of categories is not; the new
arrangement must have made sense to someone somewhere, but I do not
know who or why, because it makes no sense at all to me. Briefly
during development alphabetization returned, but it has
disappeared; here's hoping it will get restored by release time. A
good change is the addition of non-KDE applications to the
appropriate submenus, instead of segregating them in a submenu
ghetto of their own."